The retail price of America’s income inequality
Retail is considered one of the bright spots in the American economy, one of only six job categories projected to grow nationally through 2018. But a survey released this week makes clear that many of these are jobs in name only, offering poverty-level wages, highly restricted access to benefits, part-time work when full-time is desired, and a workforce so cowed that it routinely accepts working conditions that make work-life balance, or the chance to upgrade skills and move into better-paid work elsewhere, all but impossible.
The survey, conducted by Retail Action Project, a New York City-based workers’ advocacy group, offers frank data from 436 workers in 230 stores across the city’s five boroughs, from the luxury purveyors of Fifth Avenue to discount outlets in the Bronx. With 242,000 retail workers in Manhattan alone, the data – the first ever gathered directly from these workers – offers a telling and sobering look at this important industry.
The report’s highlights:
- The median wage in New York is $9.50 an hour, 52 percent lower than the citywide average for all industries. If associates in one of the nation’s costliest cities can’t even earn a living wage, who can?
- Black and Latino workers surveyed are more likely to be hired part-time and given worse schedules than their coworkers. Based on average wages and hours worked per week, white workers’ income is 12 percent higher than that of their black colleagues.
- Just over half of workers surveyed earn less than $10 an hour. But more than three-quarters of female Latino workers – 77 percent – fall beneath that threshold.
- While 54 percent of white workers received a raise or promotion after six months on the job, only 39 percent of black workers and 28 percent of Latino workers did.
The irony of retail work for many of these employees is that they can’t afford to buy much of what they’re selling. When I worked as an associate for 27 months at The North Face, a $30 hat, even with an employee discount, cost more than an hour of my labor.
The income of the median American family, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than in 1998. Gas, food and other costs have risen significantly, yet many workers’ wages are falling behind. The American economy still relies on consumer spending – 70 percent – yet fewer and fewer hardworking Americans can keep up.
But if you don’t earn it, you can’t spend it.
from The Great Debate UK:
Is there a new breed of self-reliant investors?
-James Daly is TD Waterhouse Investor Centre Representative regarding investor confidence. The opinions expressed are his own.-
Will the new decade herald the emergence of a new breed of self-reliant individual investors?
Some seem to think so according to TD Waterhouse’s annual Investor Confidence Survey of over 1,000 individual investors across the UK, with over half (53 percent) of respondents stating that they now rely more on their own decisions when making investment choices compared to just under a fifth (19 percent) who said they look more to professional advisers and brokers than they did last year.
This disparity reflects an increasing trend of self-reliance, which may suggest that retail investors have become a more sophisticated bunch as they adapt to today’s unpredictable financial markets.
The research goes on to show that 64 percent of respondents state the internet as their most popular source of information followed by the financial press (58 percent). Overall, the number of UK investors looking to professionals for advice on their trading activities has fallen slightly to a third (33 percent) while those seeking "do-it-yourself" tools from execution-only brokers has risen from 5 percent in 2008 to 20 percent in 2009.
In fact, the survey shows when it comes to investment services more UK investors (32 percent) are actively trading through execution-only brokers now compared to a year ago, while just 26 percent prefer to trade through an advisory broker.
It has been a rocky 15 months and we have seen many financial institutions falter and crumble under the pressure of liquidity constraints. If the news media is anything to go by, this has given rise to a general distrust in the transparency and accuracy of company statements and information from authority figures. While continually low interest rates have made it difficult for investors to gain returns from traditional investment options or cash on deposit.
When you consider that for some time the cpi, and essentially BOE interest rates do not represent the real cost of living, the latter being significantly higher than the cpi – savers have been and continue to be hammered. Many banks have shown themselves not to be above board both in their corporate and individual dealings so is it no surprise those who have money do not trust banks in general? There are risks in all forms of investment, and this now includes ordinary savings accounts too
You make a big mistake NeoDemo thinking that people are going to be threatened with mass extermination in industrial death camps. The Israelis have made an obsessive national ethos out of the Nazi regime and they have become a smaller scale version of it vis a vis the Palestinians.
Notes in the UN new digests (of the past few nights) have stated that the Israeli government is continuing to pursue the most heavy handed and brutal policy of forced displacements, condemnation and demolition of Palestinian homes, without compensation of any kind. The notices claim that tens of thousands of Palestinians are at risk from their overtly aggressive and idiotic tactics.